I have to take an annual fire safety training for work, and I am reminded that I asked some of the folks who manage these things how they evacuate the NICU and apparently they have vests you can load up with babies
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I don't work in patient care but I feel like it is my duty to strap babies to myself and bring them to safety at some point in my life or perhaps I will have never really lived
They won't let me near the babies (probably because I haven't done the TB testing that actual healthcare workers need to do, definitely not because I'm a weirdo who WANTS to wear one of the baby rescue vests eventually)
I did not expect this post to take off, perhaps I assumed that this was more common knowledge than it is? I think it’s adorable and practical and I am extremely glad not to be in direct patient care because imagining how to save people who aren’t ambulatory (and larger than newborns) is very scary
I worked in a nursing home and we were taught to evacuate bedridden patients by two or more people holding the corners of the patients bedsheets and carrying them out like a hammock, and I looked at the huge, multi-story building and thought, I guess a lot of people just don't get out.
This is getting overwhelming. No I don’t know what they do with babies hooked to equipment. We have fire doors and go through extensive fire training so to my knowledge our NICU has never needed evacuation. Backup generators for equipment, etc. I’m not in patient care so I don’t have specifics.
Lots of people thinking this is AI - it is not. At least not in practice - I didn’t vet this photo for accuracy, but doctor mutuals have confirmed in the replies. Also a lot of people thinking this is sad or upsetting. Okay sorry, yes it is sad thinking about having to evacuate babies, but
I think it’s very reassuring that it’s extremely rare, and efforts are made to maximize the number of babies who can be saved in these last resort situations.
The usual thing is to make sure all the fire doors have closed and then shelter in place. There are ways to get non ambulatory patients down fire stairs but they are *not fun*.
Or if the fire is in your section, evacuating sideways through said doors to the next fire cell. Patients on blankets slide nicely along hospital floors. The doorframe on the fire door might be unpleasant, but hey, it beats the fire.
One of the best things that ever happened to me was a total power failure in the hospital. We (ER) all immediately sprinted to the ICUs to manually bag all the intubated patients. It was an amazing sight.
Running upstairs 7 floors wasn't ideal, but worth it.
the last time I saw an intubated patient, she practically had "kicking and screaming" on her file. Wholly comatose. that is the worst evac i can imagine. having to evac a manually bagged patient that is liable to hurt herself and staff wildly, & that's before any convulsions/seizures/obstacles.
I could see RFK wanting these banned because they help protect the lives of children. As an alternative has juggling the babies been considered as a form of mass transportation?
This is spectacular. I remember in ethics a tutor asked ‘in a fire, would you rescue your best friend, who you can just carry, or her baby?’ Which was meant to be about potential vs known, but I was ‘if you can carry 54kg, you can drag 60, get em both!’ and he was ‘I hate practical farm kids...’
Nicely done!
This reminds me of an ethics class in Bschool where the prof sought to twist the would be captains of industry in knots with the trolley problem and variations on it, only to have every mil vet student answer immediately -
kill one, save the others.
When he was about 8, I ran the trolley problem past my son. He did the usual answer, and then I said, "but what if the larger group of people was all convicted murderers?"
His answer, "But they could change and become better."
Yes! It wants you to accept death but I was raised by lesbian mums and a vegan dad; my solution was to switch the points as the trolley ran over them and this derail the trolley, as we weren’t informed if any one was on it and even if there were, they would have a better chance of survival.
The trolley problem also seems to want us to accept inaction as some sort of neutral non-choice that you can't be morally blamed for, but given the situation the decision not to act carries an identical moral weight as the decision to act.
The trolley problem is reduced to "kill one or kill three".
Re farm kids: Owner of food-processing business told me he loved hiring farm kids b/c they could figure out how to fix anything without any money.
As the granddaughter of farmers - including a grandma who mended her torn pantyhose rather than buy new, I can confirm.
Does that mean you’re another ‘I see your thought experiment and I reject its lack of using readily available implements to solve the problem’ person? Hurrah!
I can say from experience if the FD ever has to do a baby evacuation they will never shut up about the baby evacuation. It will be 2075, there will be flying cars, and the FD will still talk about the baby evacuation.
To be fair, for a firefighter swapping war stories of their most heroic saves, the one who tells the story of how they saved 10 NICU babies while wearing full gear is getting free beer for life.
I mean I kept the pics for a reason. As an RT I was mostly amused that the equipment they picked for transport was the dumbest machine humanly available. Pneumatics for lyfe. Less shit to break. Long live the neopuff.
when i was in hospital after delivering my twins there was a tornado ripping through the area. i asked my nurse how they'd get all the babies to the basement if that was needed she told me about the "kangaroo aprons"
delightful
Imagine how much more impressive the nursery scene in Hard Boiled would have been if Chow Yun-fat had one of those! Inspector Tequila could have been rescuing 3 or 4 babies at the same time!
They're premies...even a woman of average size, weight, and fitness should be able to carry half a dozen easily. There's a septuagenarian in my neighborhood that carries 5lb weights in each hand on her walks for God's sake.
similar principle then. Cool. I thought about Spidey just going for his head, but figured then he'd have time to throw a couple of babies, which they wouldn't want to risk. Thanks :)
I’m sad the Tour de France decided to stop allowing these (although now we get the comic relief of a guy shoving eight water bottles into his jersey, so, silver lining)
I actually bought a bunch of bags on temu that fold up into themselves and I've stashed them in my car for this very reason. I never remember to bring bags!
I work in the NICU and honestly have also wanted to try the baby vests out… (ours are not as stylishly colored though)
The other evacuation device is this sled-like thing to bring babies down stairs. It’s so weirdly complicated with belays that I’d rather just run up and down the stairs.
And then they tell you to go back in and get another load. Nope, I am not running into a burning building especially one that has all kinds of flammable gasses available to enhance the fire. 1/2
Then they tell you as the mothers show up to the normal nursery to just hand them any baby…not necessarily their own. I really wanted to see how that one was going to work out……2/2
Very sad to report that the real answer is that we close all the fire doors because 80% of the NICU is babies that cannot be carried out this way. But a Swoon can dream.
It is highly dependent on what level NICU it is as to how easy an evacuation would be. Lower level NICUs where there aren't babies on high amounts of respiratory support would be easier. A baby on an oscillator or VDR in a Level IV NICU would be nearly impossible to carry out of a building.
Even intubated babies. They require much more finesse to manually ventilate with an ambu-bag because they are prone to lung collapse if you give too much pressure. All that said, fire doors are very effective.
Yeah I used to cart around babies and their vents and their suction machines and sometimes feeding machines and portable o2... you're not going to manage more than one baby even in those circumstances where you can quickly make them/their equipment portable without disaster ensuing.
In home care I did this regularly for one kid at a time though bc they get out of bed for therapies etc almost daily. You learn exactly how to move kids from one place to another without twisting all their tubing and/or pulling on things you shouldn't, but it's not exactly intuitive or easy
And if the kids are unstable in any way, it's just not a good idea to transport them 1:1 so again, you would need so many qualified staff to attempt evacs in a remotely safe way even if you had the necessary equipment for each kid and could ensure a safe path to a safe alternate NICU
i do wish i'd known about the buckets when we were in there tho, once they were off all the machines it would have been kind of fun to take them for a little bucket stroll about the ward like they were bags of mail in a western
yeah they used a stroller when io got booted to the old nursery that's now just a nurse's station i guess because there was no room for him on the actual floor and he didn't need anything but his car seat test and he had to sleep between the printer and the water cooler for three days lol
This would be great for my friend who has 11 Guinea Pigs and lives on the 6th floor of an apartment building where people are constantly failing to make toast at 2am and causing evacuations.
I do want to point out that a situation which would require evacuation of an entire hospital unit is very very very very rare (in the case of fires especially).
However, the factors that make NICU babies difficult to evacuate are pretty much the same as other units: respiratory equipment, IV medications being infused with heavy pumps on IV poles. The unique one I can think of is that many of these babies require external heat to maintain their temperatures.
This is why I can't work in these environments. I can barely walk through a door without scraping my arm or leg, I'd probably end up braining at least one infant during my escape
Mass delusion leading to chaos and death spread by lies was the cause of the Salem Witch Trials. We have an exact parallel today:
Fox News and the most evil man in the world
When our son was in NICU we saw the vest on the wall. I said “I bet that’s for loading up with babies in an emergency and my wife was skeptical but the nurse confirmed my guess. 😁
The things we think about as engineers when working in buildings would blow most people's minds. During the Virus, I worked on many temporary Morgues. And I saw lots of BIO HAZ bags. Pretty grim...... Read on it's not all negative.
One of the departments I upgraded was NICU SCBU. Was gowned head to toe, tools sanitized. Work area steam cleaned. Used to see Mum and Dad, coming in with their babies no bigger than bags of sugar. Then leaving with them weeks later. Made it easier to cope with the other stuff.
Very cool! I used to have several small parrots. I often thought, “What would I do if I had to evacuate quickly with them?” I envisioned something just like this.😁
My sister was born in Alaska in 1970, and every bassinet in the nursery had a folded-up pillowcase so if an earthquake hit they could load a newborn in there and carry lots of them at once.
I've always heard of pillowcases as the recommendation for cats in the event of sudden disaster, so now I'm picturing babies hissing and trying to claw their way out.
With how much the current political mood is burdened by those who are all-too-willing to abandon others to fate, it makes me very happy to know this exists.
I imagine these are cheaper and one person can carry multiple babies and we have, like, 14 floors of hospital and elevators would likely be out so this works better for stairs
I don’t think any of the areas with babies are on a ground floor (the hospital is built into hills so you can enter at the first floor, ninth floor, and depending on the part of the hospital, the 10th floor as well, long story) so I am sure this makes sense for our particular topography
This is wonderful for the babies that can live off a vent. I would have hoped for a more complete answer as this is more suited to the well baby nursery than the NICU.
Unfortunately as is the case with so many disabled people who are routinely ordered to stay behind in fire evacuations, with NICU babies on that kind of equipment, you shelter in place. None of my preemie charges could have survived an evacuation like this.
Yep. Every shift I had as an Ob/Gyn attending on our high risk delivery unit included a visit to the NICU to see how "my babies" were doing. The amount of equipment needed to sustain their lives is preclusive in this kind of evergency.
Many yrs ago I helped in a neonatal unit fire evacuation - babies in blankets was a thing (multiple, slid along the floor by 2 staff to get them out of the unit & around to the fire stairs at the other side of the floor where more staff from other areas carried them downstairs). I'll pass next time.
I worked in an intermediate care nursery for a time. On orientation, we were told to put as many babies as possible in a crib so they could be wheeled out as a bunch. No bassinet- the sprinklers would fill them up...
"But that's never going to be a concern. When the unit was built, the sprinklers were put in per building code, but they don't connect to the water supply. 🤫"
The building was very old, and modernizing systems wasn't in the budget. 🥺
We had a bomb threat one time when I worked OB, small hospital. We just put more than 1 baby in a rolling crib and took off running for the helipad. This would have worked.
When I worked open heart ICU, we typically had 2 heart patients at a time. We were told that in the event of a fire, we were expected to put one patient on a sheet and pull them downstairs while somehow bagging them simultaneously and then go back for the other patient. Sure. Yeah. Right.
I'm happy there's at least a plan to mass evacuate babies in an emergency already established though, because I certainly hadn't even considered this scenario.
I was involved in evacuating a 65 bed NICU back in 1999 during a fire in another part of the hospital. they had to shut off the main oxygen line to the entire hospital.
Almost every child in a 250 bed hospital was evacuated
It was nuts but organized chaos. we didnt have anything like that thing
Appreciate that. It was all about getting the kids out safely. It was shift change at about 7:15 pm so we had lots of staff to handle the craziness. I was in the OR taking a kid to a lung transplant surgery when we got the mass casualty page
Hilarious. Feeders and growers are one thing, but the micropreemies need all their stuff. It requires a lot of coordination and expertise to evacuate even for drills.
I know everyone is having a good time making jokes about this, but imagine the awesome responsibility of a job where you are required to train to carry 5 babies to safety. Big damn heroes all around us.
Day care centers for infants and very young toddlers have a trolley-like setup. During an evacuation, you put all kids in a trolley and push the trolley out. People actually get trained for that scenario.
Having sometimes worn a lot of bags, including side bags, and carried heavy things that are varying levels of delicate, this strikes me as awkward and really dangerous for the side-pocket babies. It is far too easy to sideswipe a doorway or a table corner and obliterate a baby.
I really hope the vest is a pullover, and doesn’t fasten in the back or something, cause just thinking about it tying in the back and coming undone is making me anxious.
I feel like there should be more padding at the baby head level because the number of times I have smacked my laptop bag into things just *walking around* leads me to believe there would be some bonking happening.
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Literally the first day I drop her off and check the camera at works I see an efficient teacher putting 5-6 kids into a cot and wheeling them out.
It was a fire drill, I find out when I got there later.
DD at 3 coming back and talking about an active shooter drill (not what she called it but what it actually was) broke me inside though.
Like fluoride.
Running upstairs 7 floors wasn't ideal, but worth it.
Safety 🛟 is job one!
This reminds me of an ethics class in Bschool where the prof sought to twist the would be captains of industry in knots with the trolley problem and variations on it, only to have every mil vet student answer immediately -
kill one, save the others.
No eyes batted.
His answer, "But they could change and become better."
“Too late the trolley ran over the many.”
You have to have decided in advance and pre-committed to act or you’ll never have time to think it through.
We all had.
I reckon we’re all very constrained by our backgrounds, predisposed to consider certain choices.
I like yours a lot better than philosophers and tricky teachers but I get why they do it.
Also recognize mine and those like me here. Though….
The trolley problem is reduced to "kill one or kill three".
As the granddaughter of farmers - including a grandma who mended her torn pantyhose rather than buy new, I can confirm.
delightful
Highly recommend
Me: too forgetful to remember his own bag, too cheap to shell out 10¢ for their bag, toggling Sherpa mode on every store visit.
- 194 chicken McNuggets (per pocket)
- 3,516 M&Ms (total)
- 611 Pringles (per pocket)
- 7.5 litres of soup (assuming you waterproof it)
- 5.6kg of mashed potato and/or spaghetti (per pocket)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ebEc7nzVn3M
The other evacuation device is this sled-like thing to bring babies down stairs. It’s so weirdly complicated with belays that I’d rather just run up and down the stairs.
That sounds like a really stressful situation to manage
Fox News and the most evil man in the world
Maybe that's an upgrade model.
Daycares are usually one floor, and you can put 3-5 babies in a safety crib depending on the size of the child.
https://team-solutions.us/store/evac/evacuation-devices/newborn-baby-mover/
Thanks for sharing, this is really neat!!! 🚼💙
"You can fit so many babies into this baby."
Nurse educator paused for effect...
The building was very old, and modernizing systems wasn't in the budget. 🥺
;)
If this were me there would be five dogs strapped to my body.
Now that will be in my head for days!!!
Also, does she plan on taking all three babies home and raise them as her own?
PS F**K RFK
Or one of the most interesting styles of flag football in years.
This just keeps getting better & better
Those are the exact spots they hold the baby. Cool idea integrating them into vests. Surprised they don't have more slings, though.
I find that comforting.
We evacuated that hospital in about 45 mins.
Almost every child in a 250 bed hospital was evacuated
It was nuts but organized chaos. we didnt have anything like that thing
And fire dept were heroes as always
Kept fire contained
It was chaos from there
But this is great
me, rummaging through my pockets: hang on it's in here somewhere :T
Baby vests, uh… *wets lips* found a way.